Self Hosting Website Questions

Hey Webflow Community!

Not sure If this is the right place to post this, but I give it a go any way.

I am currently building a website for my boss and I have some questions about CMS.

We want to host the website built on our own servers, but it leaves me with some knowledge gaps.

1st How do I go about updating the website after I have exported the code? Do I have to renew my webflow subscription and make changes in webflow?

2nd What is the best way to run our website form submission while we are self hosting the website?

3rd How do I make a back end page that can be used by employees to post and make changes to the website?

4th What happens to our website designs when our subscription ends? Do they get deleted? Can I still access the website design without a subscription?

Am sure I have more questions, but this is probably a good way to start off.

Thanks for any and all help anyone can provide.


Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

Hi @Samuel_Scotson

I’ll anwer your questions, but I’d be curious why you feel the need to do this. Webflow lets you use a custom domain and DNS structure so, if trying to make use of the no-code element of Webflow I can’t really see the point of exporting code and rehosting it elsewhere. This might be a misreading of what you’re trying to do.

That being said:

  1. Once you export the code, you’ll either need to modify the HTML/CSS/JS separately (in which case you might break some of the Webflow components) or keep an identical version in Webflow that you can go back to for edits. In the latter case, you’d just need to ensure that the files are identical or treat the Webflow version as a backup. If you’re hosting the site on Github, you should be able to maintain chronology in the version history so that you can revert to an older backup if changes are being made.

  2. There are a couple of ways to embed form submission on your site – but they’d all be pretty different that the native Webflow forms submission process. There are a couple ways to do this, the most difficult of which would probably be building the form itself in JS/HTML and the easiest of which is probably using something like Jotform to handle it for you.

  3. Building this outside of Webflow would essentially require you to build this from scratch. You’d have to figure out how to build member accounts and then connect your externally hosted CMS collection dynamically to user interactions with the site. It is objectively much, much easier to do this if your hosting the site in Webflow.

  4. If you’ve exported the code it will still exist, you just won’t be able to edit it again from within the Webflow UI.

Again, I’d just ask why exactly you want to set it up in this way. Happy to discuss more.

Hello,

Same question for me.
My client wants to host an ecommerce webflow on his own server (security reason). I’d like to know if it is doable or it will break all dynamic components ?

Thank you,
Arthur.